Thinkpads Forum

Hey guys, I have an x220i. I want to add an mSATA to it, but was wondering what the disk order would be with both mSATA and SATA drives installed. Reason I'm asking is that I'm planning on running Linux on mSATA and Windows 7 on SATA. Since Windows needs to be installed on the first (primary) drive, it might be a problem if the SATA drive isn't the primary drive.

If there are folks out there who can shed some light on this matter, it'd be greatly appreciated!

Drive order does not matter. You can choose it in the BIOS. It's the partition order within a drive that might matter, but modern Windows versions will do just well even if they are not installed on the first partition.

In any case, modern boot managers can be set up to handle complex multi-drive, multi-partition setups, so I don't think you have much to worry about.

I think what you mean is boot order? I'm pretty sure you can't change the drive physical address (since it's a numbered SATA port), but I can be wrong here, I'm not a hardware guy. I went looking for it in the BIOS but didn't find anything more than boot order.

I'll try to look into how Windows 7 deals with this issue.

Yes, boot order.